Do-It-Yourself Editing: A Guide for the eBook Author by Courage Knight

Anyone can publish a book these days. Amazon has made it incredibly easy. Through their kindle format, you can upload your manuscript yourself and hope it sells. Amazon offers support every step of the way, with webpages and videos from how to create the table of contents to finding a cover artist—or even how to create the cover art yourself. They have marketing strategies built right in to their kindle select program. Because of this, thousands of people are now published authors! They no longer have to wade through months—or years—of rejection slips, as they struggle to perfect their craft. Anyone who has a computer and can plunk out a couple thousand words can publish online and even charge money for their effort.

But how many times have you bought an eBook and felt that you wasted your money? Have you tried to read an eBook with so many punctuation errors in it, that it just wasn't enjoyable? Ever ask for your money back? And then what did you do? If you're like me, you made a note of that author's name so you wouldn't make the mistake of buying from him or her again.

So it is with your book! You need to revise, rewrite and reread your novel, to make sure that it is the best it can be. Even if you are going to send your book to a publisher—online or in print—you should still do your own rewriting, and submit a clean, carefully crafted story, that is original, creative, and thoroughly enjoyable.

You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.